Sometimes fun is a good thing
Fun is a dirty word in coaching. Many of us feel that fun is a detriment to practice or progress or performance. We feel that fun interferes with technical work or speed work or is disruptive to the overall flow of practice.
Because we are long removed from our daily grind as athletes we tend to look at fun through the eyes of a coach or our eyes and we forget that as with all things in life, perspective has many different angles and view points.
Often what I've encountered are coaches who fall into the trap or piece of advice I was first handed many years ago.
"The older you get, the faster you were."
I love that piece of advice. It's stuck with me since 2004 and it's one of the first that I hand out when working with younger coaches. It's also a piece of advice that I've taken to heart.
I have said many times that I've worked with many coaches at many programs who were easily the best athletes I've ever encountered...based on their stories. They showed up the earliest, and stayed the longest and always asked thought provoking questions of their coaches. And while they didn't always get it right the first time, they did always get it right.
I was not one of those athletes. I tried too little, and relied too much on the limited skills that I had. And when it came to rowing, I propped myself up on the fact that we had limited coxswains and I could cox.
I digress.
This past season I worked at a program with a young coach with limited experience who fell into the trap I outlined above. More serious, the coach developed a reputation among the team that they did not allow anyone to have any amount of fun. Everything was work, everything was serious, and it reached a point where in meetings with the officers or with the athletes, a joke would be made by this coach and no one would laugh. No one, coaches included knew whether it was ok to laugh.
This coach told me that the fun that could be found in rowing was in racing, in competition. That's where fun would be had.
I disagree wholeheartedly.
I do believe that competition has the opportunity to be fun, but that predicating the amount of fun your program will have or specifically the athletes will have on competitive results is detrimental and potentially fatal both in short and long term views.
I've played competitive sports and at no point did I ever find losing to be particularly fun. I found losing to be even less fun when it came week after week or came on the heels of a long training cycle. I can recall, vividly, many baseball, and soccer games, as well as races going sideways in a hurry where the only thing I wanted to do was finish and get out of town. Being on the wrong end of a 4-1 scoreline, or a 10 second margin wasn't fun. Returning to the sidelines or shore after those results weren't fun. Nor was the bus ride home, or practice the following day.
You're going to lose. Your team, no matter how talented and deep, will probably lose. Hopefully you'll win more than you lose and a medal can help, but riding home with second place far from first doesn't take the sting out of losing.
A typical racing schedule for rowing looks like this.
September - November: 2 to 4 head races.
December - February/March: Winter training, beginning of spring training.
Late March/April: 2 to 3 races.
April - Early May: 2 to 3 races.
Mid May: Championships.
June - September: Summer training.
That's a load of training, of two-a-days and a lot of grinding. There are some long days between November and March where if you're in the PNW it's raining or icy. The erg room begins to smell, the playlists all sound the same, and it can be difficult to summon the motivation required to slog through a 3x20' in the morning and weights in the afternoon.
We race a handful of races in the spring where the total competitive time might be anywhere from 70-95 minutes.
That's a lot of training for little pay off.
That's why I believe you're asking for programatic and cultural failure if you make "fun" dependent on competitive results and only about racing weekends.
What do you do when you lose or come up short?
What happens to the athletes who aren't on the travel squad and therefore don't qualify for "fun?"
I am not advocating for fun to become a priority in practice. I'm not advocating that you cut back the number of hard days and add in more fun days.
What I do advocate is breathing space around the program, a change of pace from time to time, and certainly some levity.
I've been at several programs and the ones where the culture was most suspect and where the athletes practically raced away from the boathouse were the ones where "fun" was a foreign concept. The program I worked for this previous spring where the head coach would make an attempt at humor and be met with deathly silent stares is a serious problem that will only get worse.
Too often we as coaches make ourselves out to be better than we were. Our stories get bigger, our times get faster, and we become enthralled with the narrative that we convince ourselves must have been real. We build this false narrative that our team and specifically our time as an athlete were the paragon of what the sport should be about, and then we go about attempting to create a culture based around those falsehoods.
Because we are long removed from our daily grind as athletes we tend to look at fun through the eyes of a coach or our eyes and we forget that as with all things in life, perspective has many different angles and view points.
Often what I've encountered are coaches who fall into the trap or piece of advice I was first handed many years ago.
"The older you get, the faster you were."
I love that piece of advice. It's stuck with me since 2004 and it's one of the first that I hand out when working with younger coaches. It's also a piece of advice that I've taken to heart.
I have said many times that I've worked with many coaches at many programs who were easily the best athletes I've ever encountered...based on their stories. They showed up the earliest, and stayed the longest and always asked thought provoking questions of their coaches. And while they didn't always get it right the first time, they did always get it right.
I was not one of those athletes. I tried too little, and relied too much on the limited skills that I had. And when it came to rowing, I propped myself up on the fact that we had limited coxswains and I could cox.
I digress.
This past season I worked at a program with a young coach with limited experience who fell into the trap I outlined above. More serious, the coach developed a reputation among the team that they did not allow anyone to have any amount of fun. Everything was work, everything was serious, and it reached a point where in meetings with the officers or with the athletes, a joke would be made by this coach and no one would laugh. No one, coaches included knew whether it was ok to laugh.
This coach told me that the fun that could be found in rowing was in racing, in competition. That's where fun would be had.
I disagree wholeheartedly.
I do believe that competition has the opportunity to be fun, but that predicating the amount of fun your program will have or specifically the athletes will have on competitive results is detrimental and potentially fatal both in short and long term views.
I've played competitive sports and at no point did I ever find losing to be particularly fun. I found losing to be even less fun when it came week after week or came on the heels of a long training cycle. I can recall, vividly, many baseball, and soccer games, as well as races going sideways in a hurry where the only thing I wanted to do was finish and get out of town. Being on the wrong end of a 4-1 scoreline, or a 10 second margin wasn't fun. Returning to the sidelines or shore after those results weren't fun. Nor was the bus ride home, or practice the following day.
You're going to lose. Your team, no matter how talented and deep, will probably lose. Hopefully you'll win more than you lose and a medal can help, but riding home with second place far from first doesn't take the sting out of losing.
A typical racing schedule for rowing looks like this.
September - November: 2 to 4 head races.
December - February/March: Winter training, beginning of spring training.
Late March/April: 2 to 3 races.
April - Early May: 2 to 3 races.
Mid May: Championships.
June - September: Summer training.
That's a load of training, of two-a-days and a lot of grinding. There are some long days between November and March where if you're in the PNW it's raining or icy. The erg room begins to smell, the playlists all sound the same, and it can be difficult to summon the motivation required to slog through a 3x20' in the morning and weights in the afternoon.
We race a handful of races in the spring where the total competitive time might be anywhere from 70-95 minutes.
That's a lot of training for little pay off.
That's why I believe you're asking for programatic and cultural failure if you make "fun" dependent on competitive results and only about racing weekends.
What do you do when you lose or come up short?
What happens to the athletes who aren't on the travel squad and therefore don't qualify for "fun?"
I am not advocating for fun to become a priority in practice. I'm not advocating that you cut back the number of hard days and add in more fun days.
What I do advocate is breathing space around the program, a change of pace from time to time, and certainly some levity.
I've been at several programs and the ones where the culture was most suspect and where the athletes practically raced away from the boathouse were the ones where "fun" was a foreign concept. The program I worked for this previous spring where the head coach would make an attempt at humor and be met with deathly silent stares is a serious problem that will only get worse.
Too often we as coaches make ourselves out to be better than we were. Our stories get bigger, our times get faster, and we become enthralled with the narrative that we convince ourselves must have been real. We build this false narrative that our team and specifically our time as an athlete were the paragon of what the sport should be about, and then we go about attempting to create a culture based around those falsehoods.
Comments